Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic–which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes it aspires to grasp–can be a genuinely critical theory.

For Brenner, ‘critique’ is not simply an oppositional orientation towards extant spaces, institutions and ideologies; it requires a continual interrogation of the changing historical conditions of possibility for such an orientation. Through its irreducible abstraction, critique is an essential moment within the ongoing struggle to imagine and to pursue alternative pathways for the production of space.